DART Police

[Ed Note: This thread is really heating up!]

Here's the deal, there are more Dallas Police Officers deployed to the State Fair of Texas than there are officers in the entire DART police department. Let's see how this stacks up and maybe we can figure out why DART seems to think that they're staffed appropriately....

DPD Minimum staffing - 150 officers on patrol
DPD Maximum staffing - 400 officers on patrol depending on the event
Number of DART officers - 138 total including the chief - in reality somewhere about 120 total on patrol

State Fair of Texas - 145,000 people per 12 hours
DART claims 98.1 million passenger trips per day or about 134,000 people per 12 hours

Let's take a look at the numbers....

Officers per person at the State Fair of Texas - 0.001034483 minimum & 0.002758621 maximum
Offers per person on DART - 0.000888889

Well, that's not working. DPD has a full order of magnitude (one decimal place) higher ratio of officers at the Fair than DART does for the entire transit system. I guess that people who go to the State Fair are more important than people who ride to work every day on DART. Still, they might be using geographic dispersion. Let's check that out next...

Area to cover - 277 acres for the State Fair or 448,000 acres (700 square miles) for DART

So based on density, we go from .6 to 1.44 police per acre a the State Fair to 0.00027 officers for DART

Hmmm...geographic density isn't anywhere close to sufficient. If it's not the number of people and it's not the geographic area they're covering, I don't really know how else you're supposed to distribute your police or make sure you have enough of them to go around in the first place. The two ways that distribution works are either over an area or by concentration (aka police to person ratio). It's pretty sad where there are more officers at the State Fair then there for the entire transit system.

Given the sparsity of the DART PD, a lot of things suddenly make sense. It's no wonder cars are being broken into at DART parking lots. The wonder is that they're not just taking the cars outright. Who's going to notice? Certainly not the non-existent DART PD.

It's no wonder someone tried to car jack me in a DART parking lot. The wonder is that I was able, through my poker skills, to bluff my way out of it without getting hurt. The next person will likely not be as lucky. Who's going to notice when it happens? Certainly not the DART PD, because they don't patrol that lot. I have never ever once seen a DART officer at that station.

It's no wonder that murders, rapes and armed robberies are being committed on DART property. Every other transit system in the world is literally crawling with police. I go for weeks some times without seeing so much as a Fare Inspector much less an armed police officer.

What is a wonder, at least to me, is why DART hasn't hired more officers. By every metric we can manage, DART is undermanned and the few police that they do have are horribly overloaded trying to do the impossible.

As much as I feel for the DART PD rank and file, I feel even worse for the unsuspecting DART passengers that get on the train day in day out thinking that they're safe.